


We Are Light

by punkrockgaia



Series: The Great and Terrible Workings of The Smiling God [1]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Addiction, Blood, Drugs, Eye Horror, M/M, Violence, bad bdsm, canon noncompliant, complete lack of aftercare, it's not even compliant with my canon, ruined orgasm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-15
Updated: 2014-09-15
Packaged: 2018-02-17 10:56:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2307158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/punkrockgaia/pseuds/punkrockgaia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cecil is becoming pure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Are Light

**Author's Note:**

> This is in no way meant to depict a healthy relationship, or anywhere NEAR a healthy state of being... Enjoy!

It’s addictive, this twist in the gut, this headlong free-fall.

The addiction consumes him. After a fix, he’s blissed-out and barely functional for days. Then the buzz wears off and the gnawing hunger begins again, and he’s barely functional for days. The he gets another hit and the cycle begins again.

He’s barely sleeping, barely eating. He speaks less and less.

He’s becoming pure, he can feel it — a thin candy shell around a light that grows and grows, pressing out against his bones, yearning to shatter him, growing bigger than the Void itself.

He can’t do the things he used to do; they all seem so small compared to the all-filling purity that makes his chest ache. 

He’s been doing poorly at his job. When Station Management howls and orders him to air a pre-recorded show of monologues from the community, he simply shrugs, loads the tape, and presses “play.”

He runs into his sister on the street. “Where have you been, Cecil? We’ve been worried.” He shakes his head, mutters excuses, turns away when her eyes begin to fill with tears.

He opens his door to find Earl standing there, a take-out container clutched in his hand. “Where have you been, Cecil? I’ve been worried.” He pretends to be too busy to visit, leaves the redhead standing on his doorstep, ears blazing brilliant crimson.

He presses the “send to voicemail” button on his phone. “Where are you, Cecil?” Carlos’ recorded voice pleads. “I’m worried.”

He can’t, not right now. He has somewhere to be.

His crucible is a dank bunker located off a dirt road that turned away from Route 800. It’s strangely familiar, bringing back comforting memories of reeducation, but with a smell of dried blood and viscera that sometimes clings to his skin for hours afterwards, and Cecil finds himself sniffing his arms, trying desperately to cling to the scent as it fades. 

He doesn’t remember the first time he came here, how he came to be here in the first place. He doesn’t clearly remember all the other times he’s been here. He only knows he _needs_ , and remembers the cure for that howling need waits inside.

The other man is waiting, sitting on an armchair, imperious. He always gets there first, no matter how early Cecil tries to be. Cecil half-thinks he’s living in the bunker, but it’s not his place to think. It’s his place to become purified, to allow purification to occur.

“Strip,” Diego commands, obsidian eyes glittering over a mouth full of sharp teeth. Those eyes are cold, so cold, and that mouth is so hot, burningly so. The cold scalds him as much as the heat does, raises the flush that is beginning to flow across his skin, rising from his groin, over his chest, up his neck, over his cheekbones. 

“I said, **strip**.” 

Cecil always hesitates. He’d like to think that it’s because he still has a shred of himself left, but the purity burning inside him tells him no. He hesitates because he loves the consequences of his hesitation.

Diego advances on him, snarling. Soft, manicured, steel-strong hands grasp his collar and tear his shirt from his shoulders, buttons plinking on the concrete floor like bullets in a firefight. He yanks his belt from his waist with a sharp, bruising compression and wraps the leather around his fist, coiling it and placing it nearby. The sight of it, a sidewinder waiting to strike, sends a thrill of need through Cecil’s core. 

His trousers meet much the same fate as his dress shirt. A dim part of Cecil’s brain quips that his tailoring bills would be quite high if he still cared about such things, but the shining light inside him illuminates the dim corner until it is obliterated. His undershirt is yanked over his head, sending his glasses clattering to the floor as well. The world goes soft-focus as Diego smiles cruelly and grinds them under his stiletto heel, the sound of bird bones snapping. Romantic.

This leaves Cecil shuddering in his boxers, skin raised in goosebumps even as the light from within sears. Diego pulls a knife from a sheath secreted in the breast of his fine wool suit and brings it close, very close to the erection that is tenting the front of Cecil’s shorts. He teases the blade up and down the bulge, drawing a mewl of desire from Cecil’s lips. 

“Pathetic,” he snorts. “Maybe I should just cut this off, hmmm? It’s certainly ruled your life for long enough. But then, you wouldn’t be my disgusting little slut any more, would you?” He grasps Cecil’s cock tightly through the thin fabric, stroking hard and rough. Cecil nearly collapses to his knees before the painful pressure ceases. He whimpers when it’s taken from him. 

“Pathetic,” he repeats, then the knife lashes out and slices the undershorts from his hips, the blade kissing the soft flesh beneath. Blood oozes as the husk of the garment falls to the floor. 

Diego steps back and looks at Cecil, and a crimson flush of his own floods his dark features, but it passes quickly, a storm cloud in front of the sun. He raises his hand to touch Cecil, fingers shaking slightly.

Cecil flinches slightly as smooth, dry fingertips glance over his face. He doesn’t know what’s coming, but he knows it will hurt. It’s not his cock or his ass that fascinates Diego. 

It’s his eye. His third eye, to be exact. The fascination carries a weight of revulsion that feels awfully like reverence. 

Diego hisses as he draws even nearer. His razor-edged nails skim over Cecil’s lower eyelid, and Cecil feels his eye, all his eyes, twitch away. Diego pulls the lid down, appears to examine the ocular structure, the fine blood vessels supplying life to the surface. He presses down slowly, deliberately, applying pressure until the eye bulges from the socket.

It’s excruciating. Cecil screams and drops to his knees. Diego chuckles darkly in his throat and does the same with now-reachable upper lid. The eye is tearing now, the lids swelling shut. Diego holds them open and moves in front of Cecil, facing him.

“Is today the day, Palmer? Is today the day I finally cut out this ugly growth and fuck you in the hole it leaves?”

Cecil shakes but does not answer. It is not his place to answer.

Diego cocks his head to the side, as if listening to a response that only he can hear. He nods. 

“No, not today. But I don’t like this, this, thing.”

Cecil shrieks as Diego rakes a fingernail across the surface of his eye. His vision momentarily clouds with blood and then the eye snaps shut as Diego lets go of the lids.

He can’t see now, really can’t see much at all, but there’s no darkness, only light. There is light, and light, and light, strobing around his mind, flashing incandescence and glare. He falls to his knees and dry-heaves. The heel of a sharp-toed shoe thuds into his ribcage.

“Get up, Palmer.”

Cecil grips the floor of the bunker and tentatively stands. The flashes and strobes are dying out now, leaving him in a cold, grey void. 

He wants the lights back.

Those soft, strong hands grab him and guide him roughly towards a cot, the locus of Cecil’s purification. They shove him down and Cecil stumbles for a moment, cheekbone glancing against a metal frame. Diego growls and sets him back up.

“I remember when you used to have a backbone, Palmer. Do you?”

Cecil’s mind flails for a moment, then calms as he’s molded into position, a plasticine doll. The warmth of Diego’s body leaves him, and he hears the other man’s heels click on the concrete, away and then back. There’s the itching chafe of a tourniquet being cinched tight around his upper arm, then the sting of a needle, and then the burn.

Cecil’s no stranger to recreational pharmaceuticals, but this drug (if that is what it can properly be called) is like none he’s ever known. For one, it has nothing to do with pleasure. It is agony, it is anguish, it is terror.

It is light.

He can see inside himself, see it, see the trees of his veins and arteries illuminated, see his nerves spit and spark like arcs of lightning. He howls as his body threatens to turn inside-out.

“That’s right,” purrs Diego. “Let’s hear that so-called voice of yours, Palmer.” His sharp nails rake into Cecil’s flesh, drawing still more blood. The tourniquet is loosened. A rasp from behind as Diego’s belt is loosened. 

There’s no need for restraints. Cecil would no more think of resisting than he would think of sprouting feathers. His hands grasp the frame of the cot with a bone-aching grip, anticipating.

Cecil hears Diego spit into his hand. They only use as much lubrication as necessary to make the act possible. It’s all right. This isn’t about the sex any more than it’s about the drugs. They are all just tools of the light.

A groan of rusted springs, a shattered scream, and an excruciating burn later, and Diego is inside him. Cecil groans and Diego moves, pounding into him. As he does, his hands move across Cecil’s shoulders and cradle his neck from behind, closing gently.

And then they are not alone. The Presence arrives easily, without fanfare. It has always been there.

“Is it time, Father?” asks Diego of the Other that blazes in the corner of Cecil’s vision. As he asks, his hands tighten. The sharp nails cut into the delicate skin over his Adam’s apple.

“Is he ready?” Blood is flowing freely down Cecil’s chest now, wet and hot. Diego’s hands slip for a moment in the blood and the sweat, then he regains purchase, gripping tighter so as not to slip again. 

“Is he broken yet?” 

Cecil feels a probe, a sensation of thick, burning fingers entering into his brain, and images of the people he loves flash through his thoughts, some of the images faded like photographs left out in the sun. 

Dana.

Josie. 

His sister.

Janice.

Earl.

_Carlos._

A single word reverberates in his consciousness as the probing fingers leave.

**No.**

Diego howls with frustration. His fingers leave Cecil’s neck and his cock leaves his ass, and the springs again shriek as he leaps to his feet and grabs the belt. The leather crashes down again and again onto Cecil’s back as Diego’s breath grows ragged and Cecil groans and writhes. A moment later he’s behind him again, grunting, and Cecil feels hot spurts upon his back as his own release dribbles from him, weak and unsatisfying. 

Cecil collapses to the thin mattress, sobbing. 

Unfulfilled. 

A rustle of fabric, and Diego’s pulling Cecil’s pants onto his slick, sore body and forcing him into a standing position. He slaps him sharply across the face.

“Try to do better next time, Palmer,” he growls. 

Blinded, half-naked and bleeding, Cecil is led to a vehicle parked outside. The world swims and spins as he’s driven to Route 800, then the vehicle stops and Diego pulls him out of the passenger side and points him in the direction of town.

“Don’t wander off into traffic. We have plans for you.” He slaps him on the ass, roughly, and a moment later, Cecil hears the engine start and the hot breeze of the exhaust flaps his pant leg as the vehicle drives off. 

He starts to walk in the direction he’s been pointed, using the sounds of the road to keep from staggering onto the asphalt. As he does, his phone begins to ring. He digs it out of his pocket and fumbles until he manages to hit the button that allows him to answer.

“Hello?”

“Cecil?”

“Carlos!”

“Oh, it’s so good to hear your voice… I miss you. How _are_ you?”

Cecil considers for a moment, then giggles. “I feel light.”

Carlos sighs with relief. “I’m so glad you’re doing better. I was worried…”

Cecil chats companionably with Carlos as he gropes his way back to town. He can’t stop smiling.

**Author's Note:**

> Like this fic, come howl at the Void with me at punkrockgaia.tumblr.com!
> 
> Diego started with VidenteFernandez (videntefernandez.tumblr.com), but I think he belongs to the world now.


End file.
